Influence of Chateau’s style seen across Ottawa’s downtown

The arrival of the Château Laurier in 1912 did more than provide Ottawa with its own grand railway hotel. It also influenced the design of several government buildings considered important landmarks today.

These include the Confederation Building and the Justice Building, two large and prominent buildings on Wellington Street. The steep copper roofs of the Supreme Court of Canada farther west on Wellington, and the Central Post Office at Elgin and Sparks streets were also tied to the Château Laurier.

“Although the Château style was originally chosen to evoke a romantic sense of the French chateaux of the 14 and 15th centuries, the characteristic form of the railway hotel with its steeply pitched copper roof, its ornate gables and dormers, its towers and its turrets, quickly evolved in the national imagination as a distinctly Canadian form of architecture,” says a 1980 Parks Canada report.

Built next to Parliament Hill, the hotel was in the right place at the right time.

In 1912, the year the Château opened, the federal government acquired land between Wellington Street and the Ottawa River west of Parliament Hill for additional buildings. It held an international design competition for the buildings the next year but did not accept any of the 61 entries.

“What they’re looking for right from the beginning is an architectural image of Ottawa that will speak to Canada,” says Janet Wright, author of Crown Assets: The Architecture of the Department of Public Works, 1867-1967. “They really felt the national capital should project an image of the country that was grand and dignified.”

In 1913, the federal government appointed a Federal Plan Commission to recommend a master plan for Ottawa and Hull and to advise on the design of public buildings.

Chicago architect Edward Bennett, who worked on the plan, said federal buildings should have “vigorous silhouettes, steep roofs, pavilions and towers,” to mix well with the Parliament Buildings.

“The external architecture of the Château Laurier, though it may require refining in detail, may be regarded ... as a worthy suggestion,” he wrote in the commission’s 1915 report.

The Château style worked with the dramatic landscape at the edge of the Ottawa River. It was evocative of French and English history: Its assymetric composition recalled Scottish baronial houses on craggy outcrops, while the steep roofs were typical of Northern France, where many early Quebecers originated.

It was linked in the imagination with the railways, a powerful national symbol. The thick walls, small windows and snow-shedding roofs seemed suited to a northern climate. With a powerful sense of shelter from the roof, it offered an image of civilized inhabitation of a wild country.

The choice was pragmatic as well as poetic. The Château demonstrated how to successfully compose a big building that didn’t look bulky and imposing and that contained a large number of repetitive rooms such as offices.

The first to be built was the Confederation Building, which opened 1932 at Wellington and Bank streets. Designed by a Public Works project team headed by senior staff architect T.D. Rankin, it has nine storeys capped by a steep copper roof with ornate dormers.

While the shape and details recall the Château Laurier, its rusticated Nepean sandstone walls with Wallace sandstone trim match the same materials in the Parliament buildings, says Wright.

Next came the Department of Justice building in 1938, also with a steep roof with dormers, turrets and carved detail.

The seven-storey Central Postal Station, designed by Ottawa architect W. E. Noffke, opened in 1939, while the Supreme Court, designed by Montreal architect Ernest Cormier, was completed in 1946.

By then architectural tastes had changed. The post office and courthouse were designed in the modern classicism style typical of public buildings of the time. In both cases, the architects had submitted plans without Château roofs.

But prime minister Mackenzie King, who was fond of the Château-style roof, insisted the plans be changed.

Some people believe the hotel inspired copper roofs on the Parliament Buildings, which were originally built with slate. But Wright says sections had been re-roofed in copper as early as the late 1880s.

The Château style lingers in the East Memorial Building (1956) and the West Memorial Building (1962) on Wellington Street. “If you look up it has this copper roof,” says Wright.

The Americans had found a “national style” in the classical architecture of Washington D.C. Competition stimulated the quest for a style which could be called Canadian, says Vancouver architectural historian Harold Kalman.

The Château Laurier belongs to a family of hotels which includes the Château Frontenac in Quebec City (1898), Hotel Viger in Montreal (1898), Empress Hotel in Victoria, (1908), Fort Garry Hotel in Winnipeg (1913), Macdonald hotel in Edmonton (1915,) the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, (1913, 1928), the Hotel Vancouver in Vancouver (1939) and the Bessborough in Saskatoon (1930).

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